The explosive growth of the Internet as a publication and interactive communication platform has created an electronic environment that is changing the way business is transacted. As the Internet becomes increasingly accessible around the world, users need efficient tools to navigate the Internet and to find content available on various websites.
In a typical content management system, users make requests for content, or search queries, such as, for example, published data available at various websites, and receive the requested content and additional content that may or may not be relevant to the requested content or to the specific user, such as, for example, advertising content associated with advertising entities having a presence on the Internet.
One approach to providing the requested content and additional content that is relevant to the request or search query received from the user is to manually create predefined associations between the requested content and the relevant content, resulting in specific interactive links in the basic content to the additional relevant content. Although this approach works well with systems having a small amount of content, it appears to be too cumbersome and inefficient for systems that store large amounts of data.
Another approach involves a hierarchical representation of the basic searchable content and the additional content, wherein all the searchable content and the additional content are represented by respective nodes in a common content taxonomy or, in the alternative, in corresponding content taxonomies. When the requested content is presented to the user, the server reads the node ID of the requested content and retrieves corresponding additional content that has a matching node ID. However, this approach does not appear to scale well for large bodies of content.